I have had the honour to meet the poet Yang Ke on a number of occasions in both Cambridge and China. I have enjoyed his presence at the Cambridge Rivers Xu Zhimo Poetry and Arts Festival, where he was awarded a special prize. So, it is an honour and pleasure very briefly to introduce a collection of his poetry to be published by Cam Rivers Publishing.

It is well known that poetry is the hardest of all art forms to translate between cultures. Music, painting, drama can all be appreciated for themselves, but poetry is multi-layered and refers to many things outside the words, already stored in the reader's experience. Almost all of its references are lost in translation, as is much of the rhythm, rhyme and diction, which gives the original force. So, I had expected that when I came to hear and read Yang Ke's poetry I would feel the same sense of disappointment and puzzlement that I normally feel when I read Chinese poetry in translation. Yet, for reasons I shall briefly try to explain, this is not the case. Instead, I read his poems with as much, or almost as much, pleasure as I read other modern poetry which I find he reminds me of – Yeats, Auden, T.S. Elliot, Dylan Thomas.

This is in part because I know the landscapes and people of China from seventeen visits there, and can thus fill in some of the picture round his words. Yet there are also other features which make his poetry powerful, even in translation. There is great energy and movement, both in the words and ideas, and yet there is also a contrasted stillness and peace at their heart. I wonder whether this is related to a Buddhist or even Daoist meditative strain in the work?

There is great variety, both within each poem and in the subject matter of the poems. They range from minute observation of a tiny flower or rain drop, to the whole of the planet (as in 'Two Halves') or even the whole cosmos. They vary from the rural, rooted in a love of nature and plants, to the contemporary urban scene. Most effectively, there is a blending of the two, where the urban sprawl of modern China meets pockets of the old agrarian China (as in 'Small Rice Field'), or where the cities become living plants (as in 'Pomegranate'). They also capture the huge variety of China itself, ranging across it provinces, and picking out its diverse population (as in 'Chinese People').

In its treatment of people, whether it is 'Mother Teresa' or ordinary Chinese workers, there is a deep sympathy and empathy, an acknowledgement of the dignity and resilience of the millions of hard-working human beings. We hear of their suffering and their strength. This also leads the poet into some withering comments on social injustice, bureaucracy, state lies and the hypocrisy of power (as in 'Related and Unrelated'). It is clear that the poet knows what working life is like and that despite his international celebrity and intellectual position, he still identifies with ordinary workers.

It is difficult in a translation to tell how effective Yang Ke's technical skills are, so I have to accept that the many prizes he has won in China, and the fact that he has been translated into several languages, attest to his ability. Certainly, the poems are excellently translated so that they are filled with effective and powerful metaphors, employ striking and evocative words and phrases, and carry the mind along with a varied rhythm.

Yang Ke's poetry reminds me of great Chinese painting. The foreground, the toiling workers and the minutely-observed landscapes are meticulously described with an excellent attention to detail. Behind this rise the misty mountains of the mind, tall peaks of thought and emotion which point to the vast landscapes of China, both in space and time (as in the Daoist-influenced 'Stone').

The poetry is valuable as a remarkable insight into both timeless China, and the most extraordinarily rapid transformation from rural to urban life that has ever happened on this planet. The poems will be an important historical document in the future, showing a sensitive and highly talented observer permanently capturing, as only poets can, eternity in a moment, a world in a grain of sand. They are important for the world outside China in giving unique glimpses of a place which is so foreign, and yet, in its depths, so familiar.

-Professor Alan Macfarlane FBA

King’s College, Cambridge

Mr. Peter HughsPoet and Editor — Peter Hughs
Poet and Editor

A Review by Peter Hughes

This is a wide-ranging and welcome collection of poems by Yang Ke, complete with English translations. The publication allows the English-language reader to savour this poet’s mastery of noting moments of transformation in which before and after are simultaneously present, perhaps blurred or overlapping.

This poetry has the knack of registering significant detail, as if glimpsed from the window of a train or aircraft, then locating the specific in broader sets of contexts. The pamphlet has the added bonus of the original texts in Chinese, as well as an illuminating foreword by Professor Alan Macfarlane.

Yang Ke’s steady gaze is directed at the world, at society, at environmental degradation, at the abuse of human beings by prevailing economic and political orthodoxies, and at the self. Most importantly, he understands and highlights the fact that these categories are never mutually exclusive. He has little patience with nationalistic pieties and slogans. Look at this poem, ‘Chinese People’ (p. 28 of the collection):

I have yet to see “the Chinese people” this winter;

I've seen ordinary, speaking bodies

keeping each other warm

on buses day after day.

They're like grimy coins:

their users hand them over frowning

to society.

But Yang Ke is not a poet to criticise contemporary society and its self-destructive systems from an exclusive position, or an elevated nest of complacent self-regard. On the contrary, he often becomes the focus for his own withering stare. Here is a representative example from ‘This is the Latest on Yang Ke’ (p. 12):

He eats a pepper steak in a pub

then 'grabs a cab' as they say in this town, then

wanders past stalls piled sky-high with colour.

Here in the South where night never falls

He watches money counterfeit love with female strangers—

His heart is half rotted away by now.

Once in a while from a jumble of icily intelligent words known as poetry

he looks up

like a fly on its pile of rubbish.

So there is a steely self-questioning that then circles out to explore and meditate upon the relationship between self and location, citizen and homeland. He acknowledges the emotional ties to his native region that remain in spite of constant travel and relocation. From the distant perspective of ‘Fields of the North’ (p. 6) he writes: ‘Pulse of my blood circulates/in the South outside my skin…’

There my native ground is found

Calm and gentle like a lake beneath ice

And motionless twilight steeps

In an ancient well, wherein the silence

Knowing no bounds

Enters into my bones

Life becomes and does not become this landscape

That last line leaves the poem delicately poised between acknowledgements of affectionate connection and, at the same time, a sense of alienation.

Yank Ke’s poetry often offers us this subtle array of contradictory forces and impulses. In ‘Windy Beijing’ (p.19), for example, he plays with cliches and traditional images of the seasons and the moon but at the same time incorporates descriptions of litter and environmental damage. Or, when writing of a place, he might throw in reminders of movement, instability and relocation, ‘the aeroplane flying over the low roof of the railway station, once again’, as he writes in ‘Journey without Destination’ (p. 18). This sense of departure being only a moment away pervades the poetry with a constant sense of mobility, uprootedness and the conditions of modern work, relationships and love. There is also a sad recognition of the gulf between our inner and outer lives, as encapsulated in ‘Little Room’ (p.11):

A little room is a magic box

Life that disappeared into a mirror

Reveals itself again

In contrast to this restless world of constant movement, the poetry of Yang Ke also reminds us of the constant threat of enforced stasis. Dissent may be stifled or silenced, protestors incarcerated or worse. In ‘At the Zoo’ (p.22) we read:

A parrot that learned to speak complained

Said this human prison went against beastly principles

Right away an eagle drilled holes in its beak

And chained it shut that very day

The poem ends with this ironic observation:

There is no safer refuge

Than within the walls of a prison

But the poet is fully aware of the value of freedom – freedom to experience the beauty of nature, and the inexhaustible potential of human life, and the terrible fragility of both on planet Earth today.